Oil dependent, host to the Vatican, and a Mediterranean neighbour of Muslim countries, Italy's relations with the Islamic world have long been delicate and controversial.

During the cold war wily politicians such as Giulio Andreotti, Aldo Moro and Bettino Craxi succeeded in maintaining fruitful ties with Middle Eastern regimes that were shunned as rogue states by much of the west.

Therefore, Silvio Berlusconi's ill-judged and undiplomatic remarks in Berlin on the presumed superiority of western civilisation over Islam were particularly surprising.

However inappropriate his words - as a member of a coalition hoping to rally moderate Islamic countries against terrorism, they were hardly helpful - they have opened a public debate in Italy on the relationship between Islam and the west.

The prime minister's attempts to rectify his "planetary gaffe" only seem to have made matters worse. Apologising in a speech to the Senate, he said his words had been twisted and taken out of context.

And in an interview with the Saudi Arabian daily, Asharq Al-Awsat, he blamed Italy's left-leaning press for attributing phrases to him that he had never pronounced - an explanation that failed to account for the presence of the offending words on television and in reports by the presumably impartial Berlin press.

The intervention of Francesco Cossiga, a former president and life member of the Senate, did little to ease the embarrassing diplomatic incident. Yesterday, Mr Cossiga invited the foreign minister to recall Italy's ambassadors from Germany, France and Belgium in protest at high level political criticism of Mr Berlusconi's blunder from those countries.

And while Mr Berlusconi was professing his friendship and respect for the Muslim world, a leading Italian journalist launched into a tirade against Islam of a virulence that would be unthinkable for a political leader.

Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy's best known women writers - the author of Interview with History and Letter to an Unborn Child - gave vent to her anti-Islamic spleen in a mammoth article published by the Milan daily, Corriere della Sera, last Saturday.

Titled The Anger and the Pride, it takes the form of a letter to the editor, beginning on the front page and occupying four full pages of the prestigious broadsheet.

Ms Fallaci, who lives in New York, described her personal reaction to the horror of the destruction of Manhattan's twin towers. She went on to praise Americans for their unity, tolerance and patriotism, to chastise Italy's divided and mean-spirited political class and to blast Islam.

The article, which breaks a 10-year media silence since she last reported for the Corriere della Sera on the Gulf war, unambiguously sets aside political correctness and good taste.

"Wake up, people, wake up! Intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the tide and appearing racist (an inappropriate word since we are not talking about a race but a religion), you don't understand or you don't want to understand that a crusade in reverse is under way here ... Desired and declared by a fringe of that religion, perhaps, in any case a war of religion," she wrote.

Strident and excessive, the article makes no attempt to distinguish between the various currents of Islam. But being written by someone who has travelled widely in the Muslim world - Ms Fallaci famously cast off her chador as a "stupid medieval rag" during an interview with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - its criticisms, however shrill, cannot simply be dismissed.

"What do we make of polygamy and the principle that women should count less than camels, that they should not go to school, should not go to the doctor and must not allow themselves to be photographed?" she asked.

Ms Fallaci provides a harrowing account of the execution of 12 "impure" youths which she witnessed in a sports stadium in Dacca, the bodies trampled to pulp under the feet of the crowd.

"Slowly they formed a cortege and, always in the name of God, they walked over the corpses ... They reduced them to a bloody carpet of squashed bones," she wrote.

Harsh and prejudiced, the article is also about what patriotism means to Italians today and appears to have struck a chord with many readers.

"I bought 65 copies of the paper at two news stands (all that were available) and distributed them to passers by: I did it for my Motherland," one enthusiast wrote to the paper the following day.

"I read and re-read the letter from Oriana Fallaci: just two words of comment: I cried," said another, while other readers suggested the text should be studied in schools. Not everyone was delighted.

Commentators have complimented Ms Fallaci on her courage, without necessarily agreeing with her views.

"She is not a hypocrite and she takes sides," said the journalist Gad Lerner, but he dismissed the text as "a devastating invective where, affirmation by affirmation, there is almost nothing with which one can agree."

The writer Vincenzo Consolo described the piece as "violent, unjust and partisan" and said reading it had made him profoundly depressed.

Perhaps what impressed readers most was Ms Fallaci's readiness to cross ideological boundaries and flout intellectual conventions - something of a rarity in the Italian media.

Whether now is the time for such adventurousness, even in a writer, is another question.